Letters

A forthcoming book, The Masters, the Magicians, and the Menders: Three Guides to Emergent Happiness and the Pursuit of Humanity, explores what we genuinely need to be happy. If you are disillusioned with oversimplified, cookie-cutter, empty, feel-good, bumper-sticker platitudes on happiness, this book may resonate with you. The maxim that “happiness comes from within,” for example, is small comfort after the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, or a cancer diagnosis. An effective approach to emotional suffering and the pursuit of happiness must reflect the complexity of our richest emotions and, at the same time, simplify that complexity in practice. The purpose of this book is to change the way we think about our search for happiness, and more importantly, how we respond to mental and emotional anguish, in ourselves and in one another.

Until a few weeks ago, a part of me was still dying. The power of the past to live on in my imagination was never so apparent. You may have one or many simulations running on an endless loop in the back of your mind. In these you have trapped a phantom self, a portion of your whole self where you face dangers or losses that once came your way and have since vanished.

You know when you’ve passed the point of no return, and anguish takes over, but all is not lost. The event horizon of a black hole is a boundary which, once crossed, makes a fall toward its center inevitable. Even light is bound, giving the black hole its morbid moniker. This offers a good metaphor for experiences of anguish.

Why do we feel bad on good days? Listen to your intuition. Valid causes of emotion are not always simple and clear. Even when emotional pain is recognized as a legitimate signal that something personally significant is happening in the outside world, intense or lasting pain is often considered a faulty signal, like a broken smoke alarm going off in the absence of smoke. We have a tendency to categorize emotions as either justified or faulty–a sign that some life event is affecting us, or a sign that we’re in error. The latter, taken to its extreme, may prompt the perception that our thoughts and feelings are somehow defective. All of this hinges upon the ability to notice how the world evokes our emotions. A common illustration to explain faulty emotions is the rope that evokes fear because it looks like a snake. A person experiences instinctive fear even though … Read more

Those who understand the dynamics of psychological abuse know first-hand that the most effective abusers make you blind to the abuse. They teach you to reinterpret your surroundings, ignore your intuitions, and walk willingly, enthusiastically, into your own powerlessness.

I’d like to suggest a different question. We have emojis to express feeling happy, sad, angry, afraid, surprised, and more of what we might call everyday emotions. As far as I know, other than a few suggestive images (like the face with a bandage) there are no emojis for depression, panic attacks, profound grief, dissociation, post-traumatic stress, or a dreaded existential crisis. What would they even look like? People sometimes use smiley faces when chatting about negative topics as a way of masking pain or depression, according to a recent study published in Frontiers in Psychology. The study confirmed what other researchers have found. When we have any emotion, especially emotional pain, that experience is couched in a world of social norms and cultural meaning. Perhaps the biggest social norm concerning emotion is that the level of pain you experience or express should never be so great that it cannot … Read more